There Will Be Blood

It's all about the frogs. Remember the scene in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia in which John C Reilly is driving through a lonely town when, suddenly, from out of nowhere, a hail of frogs rains down on his car? And across the neighbourhood, too - forcing ambulances to slide, startling people ensconced in bed? It's crazy, funny, almost unbelievable. The work either of a lunatic or a genius.

There Will Be Blood, Anderson's new film, reproduces that feeling of exquisitely dazed confusion. It magnifies it by a hundred. It fertilises every scene with moments - of drama, character, acting, camerawork, music - that make you want to swoon, laugh, cry out with shock. It is, in its imaginative scope and its delirious, almost demented ambition, as bold a film as has been made in recent years.

A dark American epic, tapping the same mythic reserves as D W Griffith's Birth of a Nation, or even Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, this adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! is set in turn-of-the-century California. Here Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) hacks away at the earth, prospecting for silver and later for oil. He's an outsider who likes to get his hands dirty, an enemy of clean-collared speculators, a man who seems to have severed himself from any kind of intimacy.

This obsessive will-to-succeed serves him well. Soon, accompanied by son H W (Dillon Freasier), whom he secretly adopts after the boy's real father dies in a mining accident, he hobbles around bone-dry western expanses persuading local patriarchs to lease him land. The silence and the brooding, latent violence within him mirror that of the landscapes around him. When an oil tower catches fire, the flames light up the night sky beautifully; they seem like a premonition of personal eruptions to come.

The film was shot in the same part of Texas as No Country For Old Men. Where the Coen brothers take blood-letting and violence for granted, preconditions for the cinematic chess games they like to construct, Anderson conducts a deeper archaeology of the frontier psyche. He probes and illuminates Plainview's isolationist mentality, illustrates the dynamic but dangerous purity that undergirds it, is alert to and honours the comic theatricality in which it sometimes finds physical form.

Plainview is a zealot who has to compete against organised religion for the hearts and minds of the people he encounters and exploits. His rival is a young priest called Eli (a marvellously slithery Paul Dano), who insists that he donates money to the local church.

Their relationship is one of mutual suspicion, draped at first in fake respect. Each humiliates and is humiliated by the other. Each of them has a brother whom they barely know; the twisting evolution of their relationship isn't just a dramatisation of a perennial oil v religion battle, but a visceral, near-biblical sibling enmity.

The action unfurls across years and decades. Anderson's dialogue uses declarative, almost courtly 19th-century rhythms to powerful effect. It's also sparing: the film's extraordinary opening scenes are entirely wordless.

The soundtrack, by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, channels striking, ear-buzzing motifs from such modern composers as Ligeti and Arvo Pärt, producing the sonic equivalent of the menacing, disorientating modernity that oilmen like Plainview ushered in.

And then there's Daniel Day-Lewis. Can anyone now doubt that he is the finest, bravest actor of his generation? Anderson wrote the part of Plainview for him, and he has repaid the director with interest: we see him sweating and back-smashed, crawling across a desert floor; touching and allowing himself to be touched by his adopted baby son; raging across a bowling alley, out of his mind with drink and pain and megalomania, strings of drool leaking from his mouth.

He gives his every sinew to the role, filtering John Huston in Chinatown and early De Niro into a syllable-relishing, unfathomably sad, frighteningly unpredictable monster. And hero: his Plainview is a pioneer, a lone adventurer, the perfect American capitalist in his willingness to breach tradition, to bridle against respectability. There's something lunatic in that drive, something that seems funny but verges on the inhuman: "I drink your milkshake!" he roars in one unforgettable scene that recalls - and bests - Kubrick.

Anderson has long been one of the most ambitious young American directors. He has learned from and sought to emulate the likes of Altman, Scorsese and even Malick.

There Will Be Blood, assisted by cinematographer Robert Elswit, is a maverick and unclassifiable piece of filmmaking that rivals the finest work of his idols. Beholden to no genre, scourged free of irony, ferociously true to itself, it is a modern classic, an unhinged masterpiece.

Juno

Juno, which was released in America just before Christmas, is a very modern nativity story. A 16-year-old, growing up in the middle of nowhere (Minneapolis), decides to lose her virginity to a choirboy-like classmate, one so soft and skinny he makes barely a noise, and bingo: she is pregnant.

There are many ways to handle abortion on screen. Currently playing in cinemas is 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the Romanian drama that treats the topic as both thriller and social critique. Waitress (2007) played it as tart comedy, while last year's Knocked Up regarded "schma-ortion" as an occasion for close-to-the-bone frat-boy humour.

Juno, directed by Jason Reitman from a screenplay by the delightfully-named Diablo Cody, starts out working the comic angle as energetically as possible.

The title character (Ellen Page, in real life 20-going-on-12) is a teenage Dorothy Parker reeling off lines such as, "Being pregnant makes me pee like Seabiscuit", and swathing herself in layers of irony: "I'm just calling to procure a hasty abortion," she tells the receptionist at the clinic.

Her friends and all the people around her, however slack or simple they look, are equally snappy gabbers and phrase-conjurors. The local storekeeper asks her, "What's the prognosis, fertile Myrtle", and tells her a pregnancy test "is one doodle that can't be undid, home skillet".

Funny though these lines are, especially when they're tossed out with such casual aplomb, they don't come from or reveal much about the characters themselves. Teenagers can be smart; they can be hyper-eloquent; but they don't normally trade in this kind of hip, zingy banter that soon wears a little thin.

So it's a relief, and the saviour of the film, when Cody slows down, allows a moody fragility to suffuse the story, and allows Page to show off her acting talent. And what a talent she is: at once beseeching, feisty, self-assured. Michael Cera as her sort-of boyfriend, Paulie Bleeker, is equally winning, his voice as soft as a duck-feather pillow, his comic timing impeccable.

The rest of the cast, including Allison Janney and J K Simmons, are excellent, too, but the best performance of all is Jennifer Garner as a yuppie mother, in her way as tough and child-like as Juno herself, to whom the teenager wants to donate her baby.

Given its subject matter, and its huge success in the States, it's unsurprising if grown-ups see this as a valuable piece of demographic research, an insight into the complex minds of their teenage children.